from 217 miles east of the San Francisco Marina

Monthly Archives: January 2018

Well, when I rode my bike from Ralston Street to California Avenue last week and watched the men pull the mansion down Plumas Street to make way for Mr. Ramos’ drug store, which would later become the Cheese Board, I kind of screwed up. The house wasn’t going to Virginia Lake, that was another one. I knew I was in trouble when I rode out again last weekend with my Brownie Hawkeye camera to take some pictures for you. There was no way they could get that big house down any of the hills at Country Club Drive or Mountain View, and it was too big to take along Lakeside Drive. So they left it at the southwest corner of Mt. Rose and Plumas Streets. My little buddies Dee Garrett and Rosie Voyles wrote me, and said it was haunted. (And it’s not the recording studio-turned-law office that’s on that corner now.)

So, I have to admit that – but – since we’re out by Virginia Lake anyway I’ll tell you about another house that was built eight years ago, in 1941. It was finished the same year that Virginia Lake first filled to its rim. I stopped at the house at the corner of Audubon and Lakeside Drive, at the bottom of the hill down Country Club Drive. There was a nice man standing by this big house, and I got talking to him.

It turns out that his name was Luke Hancock. He was pretty rich, Dad said, and had formed the Hancock Oil Company and sold it years ago to the Pure Oil Company. He came to Reno before World War II and spent some time at the Country Club on Plumas Street before it burned. He told me that he stood on a barren bluff overlooking a big hole in the ground a mile around watching WPS crews planting trees by the dirt road ringing what would soon be Virginia Lake.

He had planned to move to the Holmby Hills of Los Angeles County, but immediately came to like Reno more. He had his architect in San Francisco change the house he was going to build in LA, to suit this site. Although his five children were mostly out of the house in 1940, he built this big six-thousand square-foot house anyway.

Luke invited me in to see his house. Even though I was only eight, a lot of things stuck out in my mind – a mansion with a grand staircase winding up to three huge bedrooms. (The little oval Arabesque window in the master bath fascinated all those who strolled around the lake until the home was totally remodeled in the early 1980s.) It had a big kitchen on the west side of the house with an adjoining “butler’s pantry” with all the dishes and stuff. Those rooms opened up to a breakfast room with a curved wall on the south end of the house. From there, was a huge dining room. And the walls of both rooms had what he called “fresco” art. He said that he had hired an artist to come from France to do the fresco walls – a dark woodgrain with some hanging plants in the dining room, and a bright scene of a bayou in Louisiana from a photo he had taken, of a shadowy bayou with sunlight radiating through Magnolia trees with Spanish moss hanging from them. The artist came to America in 1940 and did this house and a few others in Los Angeles for an architect named Paul Revere Williams. Pretty cool.

The living room had a big window that looked out over Virginia Lake, where the trees were now five or six years old and looked pretty nice. It was a large room with an egg-and-dart coving around the ceiling and what Luke called “parkay” hardwood floors. I looked the word up later last night and it’s parquet but that doesn’t look right. A big front door opened to the front porch, and a driveway that went from the bottom of the hill to the front, around the side of the house and out to the street. I asked Luke why the peephole in the door was so low; he told me that it’s because he and Mrs. Hancock were both quite short, and they designed the house with the peephole, the basins and the counters and the clothes hanging rods in the closets, all low so they could use the easier.

We went down to the basement, which was a real treat – the big southeast room was just a fun room with all kinds of stuff in it, but what was really neat was the collection of dolls – Mrs. Hancock collected dolls and had over a hundred dolls from all over the world, from Europe and China also, and had a lady seamstress almost full-time to make clothes for the dolls, which were from a foot to three-feet tall. The room would have been pretty weird to be in at night! (I learned later that when Mrs. Hancock passed away, and she outlived Luke, that a collector would buy her dolls for almost a million dollars. Some of them were pretty rare…)

We went up two flights of stairs to the bedrooms – three rooms, all good sized bedrooms each with its own bathroom and tub and shower. There was a sitting room up there too, and two rooms had private balconies out over the lake.

The coolest room in the house was the library, which was on the main floor. Luke had a lot of pictures, and books, and maps, and many of them on display. A huge fireplace comparable in Reno only to the fireplace in the adjacent living room. Beveled- glass, beam trusses resting on ornamental iron corbels to the cathedral ceiling. The walls were rich, brown wood like walnut or oak, with a lot of brass fixtures and lamps and a ladder on wheels to roll around and reach books on the upper shelves. Luke reached around a cabinet and got a crank, a long handle with a loop on one end. He said, “Watch this!” and hooked the crank around a concealed hook on one of the top bookshelves. He turned the crank, and the glass ceiling, which was kind of a green cut-glass with flowers and stuff in it, started to open. First an open hole in the center, then opening further like the iris in your eye, opening larger with each turn, until finally the sun started to beam into the room through the roof. Pretty neat. And I can write that he and Mrs. Hancock passed away and the house sat for a long time, until only this seven-year-old kid even knew it was there! No lie – I showed in the early 1970s this sunroof, to a couple of grownups, who didn’t know anything about it. But this is 1949 and I don’t know anything about that now either.

Luke and I went out into the yard, into a garden house with a whole lot of stuff stored in it. He touched a button, just for a second, but it was long enough to start a generator that he had in the little shed. It was built by Koehler, now Kohler, and ran on propane. It had enough power to light the minimum of lights in the house, to operate the elevator (which would be dismantled I 1974), to run a couple refrigerators and the bomb-shelter which was built in 1952.

Having made friends with Luke, I returned to the house several times until he passed away. In 1952 he converted one of the three bays in the garage to a bomb-shelter, during the height of the Cold War. It had several beds, a water supply tank that was constantly being re-circulated to keep it fresh, a forced-air filtration system, a propane heat source, basins and a tiny shower and lots of books and stuff to read. He stocked it with food, which still had the labels of Washoe Market and Sewell’s Market on them. And a classic Zenith Transoceanic long/short wave/AM battery-or-AC radio – state of the radio art in 1951 and for many years to follow. The door was double – one looking for all the world like a jail-door with bars, the other a heavy, metal airtight door. Luke said they built this way because when the Russian bombers were enroute, the jail door would be closed to keep panic-struck neighbors from crowding into your shelter and eating all your goodies, but would allow the concussion from an atomic blast to blow over the shelter and not collapse it. After the blast had occurred, the air-tight door would then be closed to keep the death rays out.

Hey, I’m seven years old. It all makes sense to me….

Anyway, that was my meeting with Luke B. Hancock at his Mediterranean-villa home at the southwest corner of Virginia Lake – the home and the lake each in its infancy (pretty neat writing for a seven-year-old, huh?!) I went back many times until it sold out of the family (they had five children!) in 1974. It sold, by the way for $205,000…

And I got in a lot of trouble for taking the aerial picture with my Brownie Hawkeye and awakening half of 89509 as I buzzed over too low on a Sunday morning. I say this because it’s copyrighted, I suppose, but this 2018 internet posting is the first time it’s ever been published so if you steal it, give attribution, please (the year is 1975).

So that’s my bike ride for today; it’s a long haul back to 740 Ralston Street but come back later and we’ll have another adventure!!!

This piece appeared in the 1931 Reno High School yearbook, the ReWaNe (REno/WAshoe/NEvada). No attribution given to the student author, who might have penned it on a solitary night at the Santa Fe Hotel. Some reader might claim it as their work – they’d be 100 years old now. The text begins:

“Introduced into this country about five years ago, the beret has become the sensation of the hour and the inveterate choice of the hoi polloi. Tennis players have affected berets ever since Jean Boratra, better known as the “Bounding Basque,” made such an outstanding success with his pancake-shaped top-piece. Golfers took it up close on the heels of the tennis fans. And nine-nine and forty-four hundredths per cent of the miniature golfers – or should I say tiddely-winks experts – have adopted the beret as their badge.

“There is something uplifting and comforting about the fit of a felt beret on the old cranium. No matter how old or how battered it is, you feel qualified to strut with the best of the crowd when you wear it. It gives an inexplicable feeling of confidence and self-esteem, which is puzzling, since there are so many other numbskulls wearing “critters” who must be in about the same mental frame.

“A beret is one of the least distinguished pieces of head-gear ever created. Designed originally for sports, it goes to school, to five o’clock tea, to prize fights, to dances, to weddings and funerals, and even to church. Every stenographer boasts of a half-dozen in her wardrobe; the screen stars have a beret for e very costume – everyone from the gray-haired dowager to the year-old tot sports one.

“There are as many ways of wearing a beret as there are of tying knots n a piece of string. Straight up from the eyebrows, it resembles a French chef’s cap, from which it may have been derived. Placed squarely on a mop of shoulder-length hair, it brings visions of the inverted-bowl and pruning shears haircut popular in our youth, before we were old enough to object. Placed on the back of the head with hair bushing out at front and sides, a clever impersonation of an Airedale dog is achieved. Worn forward over one or both eyes, it gives that natty, natural aspect, ad infinitum.

“As to there being anything sissyish in a man’s wearing a beret, we would advise you to say nothing about it if you think so. People have been run out of town for less, and besides, we know a football player who wears one.

“The beret is ideal for yachting and speeding in a roadster. It sticks like a leech in the teeth of the strongest gale. It is the mainstay of the rumble seat rider as well as his protection from the elements. There doubtless would be many more bald pates in this country if the beret had not happened along, just in time to offset the evil effects of hatless rumble seat riding. In B. B. (Before Berets), if a man rode hatless in a rumble seat he was certain of losing at least half his hair combing knows out of it afterwards. Now he doesn’t even lose his dandruff.

“White berets are considered conspicuous until they have acquired a generous coat of grime. From then on, the object seems to be to get an agent-in-the-dirt effect punctuated by swipes of lipstick and chocolate, with an occasional gleaming white place in a fold. Other colors, particularly tans, are considered bourgeois. Trying to age a tan beret is like trying to sunburn an Australian bushman.

“Only initiates wash berets; the dirtier they are, the better they feel. Seasoned veteran say that to wash a beret is net to the sin of washing a sweatshirt, which, according to old theater tradition, brings bad luck to the wearer.”

Well, we’re coming up on the first anniversary of me writing down about my adventures from 740 Ralston Street – I started on Super Bowl Sunday in 2017 and here it is almost a year later; I’m seven years old now, a year older and wiser; my little sister Marilynn is out of the bassinet into the playpen. The little red-haired girl still lives next door, now she has a baby brother who will grow up to be a dentist. Dad has his own office now, away from A Street in Sparks to 119 East Liberty Street, across the street from Southside School.

The war’s been over for over a year now, a lot of my friends’ dads are coming home, the merchants’ shelves are starting to get stuff on them, and the Army’s vehicle repair center behind Washoe County Hospital is being dismantled. Quonset huts are going all over town, we have one at Mary S. Doten and there’s a barracks at the corner of Tenth and Ralston Street a couple blocks from my house, by my buddy Don Hartman’s house.

I’m riding my bike further away from the house than I’m supposed to, all the way down to California Avenue where dad is going to build a new office, I’ll write about that someday. But today, and it’s actually 1951, there’s a lot of activity on California Avenue where Humboldt Street comes in, by Powell’s Drug Store that the Lee family built for their car-leasing company upstairs. A crew of men has pulled away all the foundation and rubble under an old white two-story house, pretty fancy place at that. The men are from the Bevilaqua family, who moves houses all over Reno. Dad says it’s not unusual for someone to sell the lot where a house is, and take the house to a new place in town or Sparks.

The old house they’ve got up on timbers now was a Reno mansion, which looks a lot like Mrs. Levy’s house down the street at Granite Street, which would later become a bookstore named Sundance or something, but I don’t know about that yet. Anyway this big house is up on blocks and the Bevilaquas are putting wheels under the timbers. I heard a guy say that tomorrow they’re going to tow the house out by that new lake south of town, Virginia Lake. Boyoboy, I’m going to get skinned tonight but I’m coming back down tomorrow and watch them move it if I haven’t been grounded.

Aha! I told Mom I was at the Christian Science Reading Room on First Street all afternoon, so I’m a free kid still. Down the hill I go to the river, to the new Chestnut Street bridge and across the Truckee, up the hill on Belmont to California Avenue. Then down toward town where all the men are back. A great big truck is sitting pointing down Humboldt Street, with an iron towbar hooked to the house. They’re getting ready to move the house!

I learned that the place is being moved because a pharmacist named Mr. Ramos, who has a drug store at Second and Virginia Streets downtown, is building a new drug store on the site of the house. He’s going to live upstairs in the drug store. The land next door to the east, to Hill Street, was going to be leased to Texaco for a service station operated by a friend of dad’s named Jess Brooks. His daughter Patsy is a real looker but I’m too young to look. (That, however, will pass.)

They start up the big truck. Both of Reno’s motorcycle cops are on the street and there’s a bunch of guys from the power company and Bell Teleephone on the roof of the house with poles. They will ride on the house while it goes out Plumas Street, and lift the power and phone lines to allow the house to pass under (the brick chimney has been taken off the house). They’ve moved some of the wires and trimmed some trees back, and planked up Plumas Street where the house will pass over the Cochran Ditch. The house is heavy and might collapse the street.

The ugly old truck starts to pull against the drawbar, and make a huge racket and pumps black smoke from its two exhaust pipes. It shakes and the tires on the two back axles slip a little bit but the truck keeps pulling. All of a sudden the house moves and starts to rise where the wheels under it hit the little uphill grade from the basement, to California Avenue. It keeps pulling, roaring and smoking and eventually all the tires are on the pavement and the truck starts to turn to the left, toward Plumas Street. The motor cops stop the traffic. All the movers and the people who work in the offices cheer, even Mr. Hardy, in the big house next door across the alley, is watching from his front porch of what we now call the Hardy House. And Mom is really going to be mad at me for writing “cops!”

But what else is new. The truck and the house reach Plumas Street and it becomes clear how much the house being moved looks like the Levy Mansion. Granite Street doesn’t line up with Plumas yet. In fact it wouldn’t even be called “Sierra Street” south of the river for a few more years. The truck swung wide to the left then started a right turn, to go south on Plumas. The men on the roof lifted wires and walked to the “back” of the house, holding the wire and letting it fall behind the house as it moved. They were pretty good at it, as there were a lot of houses being moved around Reno and Sparks. But not as big as this one.

I rode my bike along behind it. A few other guys rode along too, and a photographer from the Nevada State Journal with one of those big black Press Graphic cameras. There would be a picture of it in that paper in the morning.

We traveled south on Plumas Street, and passed slowly by Billinghurst Junior High School. In a couple of months the new Reno High School would open at the bottom of the California Avenue hill and a lot of kids will go there. We passed by my friends Ty and Bill Cobb’s house at Martin Street, across from Billinghurst.

We got to Mt. Rose Street, beyond the planks over the Cochran Ditch where all the men were worried about the weight, but the planks held. Mt. Rose was the south city limits of Reno and there wasn’t much beyond there – just a few houses. Somebody said that Plumb Lane, with a “b” on the end of Plumb because it wasn’t named after a Plum but a family, was going to be extended eastward from Arlington to South Virginia, and then all the way to Hubbard Field, our airport.

HA! I thought. I may not live long enough to see Plumb Lane go all the way to Hubbard Field!

It’s getting close to my bedtime and I know Mom and Dad are going to make me turn the light off, so I’m going to quit writing tonight. Within the next week I’ll tell you about getting the house all the way out Plumas Street where it was going to be placed, and we’ll poke around Virginia Lake a little – it’s a fun place.

So – I’ll leave you here – the house has been moved as far as Plumas and Mt. Rose Street and it will stay there all night. Come back in a while and we’ll pedal back to watch them put the house in it’s new home by Virginia Lake!

Boyoboyoboy – I thought I’d seen Dad mad when Hank Philcox and I floated the Orr Ditch under Ralston Street in our inner tubes, but that’s nothin’ like he was when he found out about my little ride to the airport west of town – wowee! He grounded me the day after Christmas and I haven’t been able to leave my room since ‘cept for meals. (At left, a Beechcraft D-18. All the planes and trucks in this letter I’m writing were tied down at the airport we rode our bikes to)

It all started when I heard that there was an airport west of town, off Seventh Street that was paved out to Peavine Row, which I guess would later be called Keystone Street. Then it was just a dirt road from there all the way to a little town called Verdi. I can see right now that I’m going to have to use that crystal ball and ouija board I wrote about in September that looks into the future to write about this screw-up that got my little six-year-old ass in a sling (my Uncle John said that once and Mom got real mad.)

Anyway, we rode our bikes out Seventh Street to Peavine Row where there would be a Raley’s Market one day, then kept riding and riding and riding, on the dirt road. And riding. We finally came over a little hill, the other side of the old graveyard by the Highland Ditch, and could see a windsock sticking up above an old hangar.

There was a whole little airport there, probably really just an airstrip. A tired hangar with some oil company’s name on it (Hancock Oil?) Dad said later when he was talking to me again that before WWII oil companies would build a hangar at an airport to get them to sell their aviation gasoline. And this is not the old hangar that’s on the street above the old highway 40; that one came from Reno airport when they widened Terminal Way. There was an air strip, paved but pretty rough-looking with a lot of cracks in it and a faded white line down the middle. Landing toward the west it would probably be designated as runway two-six or –seven. All the buildings and stuff were at the east end which heading would be runway eight, or nine.

A building sat at the east end of the runway, looked like a GI building and I learned later that it was brought in from Reno Army Airbase north of Reno. And from my crystal ball, I can tell that it’s still there (at right), now turned into a house along with a whole bunch of other houses, doesn’t look like the Sproul houses around it. It’s at the northwest corner of two streets, Apollo and Attridge. It’s just west of a school that would be called Clayton Middle School, but this is before 1950 so I don’t know about that yet.

This was really cool! There were a whole bunch of airplanes on the tarmac next to the runway, many with engines or parts missing. As we rode our bikes up and put the kickstands down to get off, a plane was landing toward the east. It stopped by where we were and a guy got out. He was wearing a set of green coveralls, which I learned later was a flight suit. He waved at us.

We went over and he started talking to us. He was a pilot from back east somewhere that had been sent to Reno Airbase to practice flying. (At the left is the picture of a BT-1 “Boston,” similar to the T-6s and SNJ trainers.) He said that a lot of guys would take a plane like this and practice landings at this airport, at one up by Pyramid Lake called Sky Ranch, and one further away up at Beckworth towards Portola. It was called Nirvino Field or something like that. He said there was a field in Sparks called GreenBrae, and another south of the SP railyard called Vista, but the Army pilots couldn’t practice on those because they were pretty busy. (The Nugget’s Dick Graves in later years kept his Navion at Vista Airport.)

Our new pilot-friend’s airplane was also a “Navion.” It was built by North American as an Army trainer. It had one engine and a “clamshell” canopy over the four seats (pictured right). He pointed at another older plane across the field that was built by Ryan as a trainer, a PT-19. Pretty-well shot; it didn’t look like it could fly.(pictured left).

He asked us if we wanted to sit in the plane, and showed us how to climb up onto the wing and into the cockpit. I sat in the front, right seat and my friend sat behind the pilot’s seat on the left side. Our pilot friend climbed into the front seat next to me.

“Wanna see how it starts?” he asked, and turned some switches. The prop at the front of the plane started turning, and after a couple turns the plane shook, smoke blew over the windshield and the engine was running. He closed the bubble over us and it got a little quieter. “Wanna take a ride?” We thought about it for about a tenth of a second and answered, “Yeah!” He showed us how to buckle up, then firewalled the throttle on the dashboard in front of me, and we taxied onto the runway. There was no wind raising the windsock, so we headed west on the runway and pretty quick we were airborne and he tucked the gear in.

Wowee!

“Where do you live?” he asked. I told him the street, Ralston. “How can I find it?” I told him at the top of my lungs that it was almost at the west edge of Reno, across from a square-block park. He cranked the plane around and we headed for Reno. “There’s the park!” I told him, that I lived one house down from the street at the north side of the park (University Terrace). He went down to treetop level, over the tennis courts at Whitaker Park so low I could see cars and people looking up half-terrified. We went over 740 Ralston Street and I could see my dad’s Chevy in the driveway, must have been lunchtime. We turned left over the University and headed back toward the airport. The pilot pointed at the gas gauge, said he was low.

Just what I needed to hear. I can read it now: “Six years old, found in the wreckage of the plane not far from where Bill Blanchfield crashed his U. S. Air Mail deHavilland biplane in 1924 into 901 Ralston Street. Both of them cut down in the prime of life.” I could see the airstrip coming up in front of us. He lowered the landing gear, flew beyond the field, 180’ed and landed to the east. He braked to a stop and raised the canopy. I was still grinning.

We climbed out of the plane, down the steps and onto the ground. He waved a “thumbs-up,” gunned the engine and turned a 180 to head down the runway. In a few hundred feet, he lifted it off the ground, turned back and made a low pass over us, wagging his wings.

We waved back. We had taken our first plane ride! Problem was, we couldn’t ever tell anyone, especially Dad.

Fathers are scary people. We pedaled home; I was relieved to see the Chevy gone from our driveway. But, when Dad (“Senior,” as many called him, as I was “Junior”) came home that night he asked me if I did anything interesting today. “Oh, we rode out to that airport west of town; did you know there was a airport west of town?” I asked. He knew.

Senior went to his grave in 1971. I will never know how he knew about that purloined plane ride, nor what he knew; all I know is that my ass has been grass for the past two weeks.

(Yet, I’d do it all over again!!!)

With thanks to Matt Bromley, we’re able to add an old (1950) Reno map showing the location of “Skyline Airfield,” not “Hillside” as I wrote – more will follow about this as time permits. Thanks, Matt…

“You’ve walked all over town in past columns, why don’t the Gazoo readers walk East Fourth Street?” Or so a few readers wrote.

(This is a re-run of an old column….)

It’s mostly because the RG-J recently carried an excellent three-issue overview of East Fourth with more ink and graphics than I could ever hope to squeeze out of the real estate editor. This piece started as a commentary on old signs, but while riding around with a notepad some quirky thoughts of East Fourth in Reno and B Street – Victorian Way – in Sparks still beckoned to be heard, so we’ll mix up the two themes this morning.

To the ongoing horror of friends, the two neon signs that most interest me while I’m enjoying an ale or three at the Great Basin Brewpub in Sparks are first, the Pony Express Motel sign at the Prater/Victorian “Y”, a late-1940s product of Pappy Smith’s (Harolds Club) and Young Electric Sign’s imaginations. I started to write that it was the first “motion” neon sign in town – (the arrows being shot over Prater Way from the car wash, from the Indians’ bows) – but I now spell-check out any superlatives, like first, oldest, highest, etc. And “railroad” or “architect” for that matter.

It’s much too big to steal, but the second sign I lust after is more portable, in front of the old Park Motel on Prater Way; the Phillip Morris-type bellboy with the once-waving arm that used to beckon travelers into the “motor lodge.” It’s a creation that would blow the CC&Rs of the God-forsaken desert to smithereens if I lit it up in my backyard, waving at the architectural committee. No chance. Note the other remaining motor hotel signs on East Fourth – the Sandman, with the tires on the prewar sedan that once appeared to revolve. And the classic neon art style, with no name that I know of attributed to it, on Everybody’s Inn and Alejo’s motels’ signs, and a few others – hopefully they will all be saved, rehabilitated and displayed somewhere as signs of a bygone era, no pun intended.

Check out the architecture on East Fourth – the brick patterns in the Alturas Hotel, J.R. Bradley Company, the buildings that flourished in the early postwar period like Siri’s Restaurant, Reno Mattress and some of the retail stores. Replicating the rococo brickwork style in some of those buildings today would cost a fortune. And Ernie’s Flying “A” truck stop, we called it then, now signed as RSC Something-or-other: The fluted column-tower signature of Flying “A” stations has long since been all but removed from this garage, but look close and you can easily detect a close resemblance to Landrum’s Café architecture on South Virginia – a very prevalent commercial style of a prewar period. (Ernie’s was, with McKinnon & Hubbard on West Fourth Street, the forerunner of Boomtown, the Alamo and Sierra Sid’s to old U.S. Highway 40 truckers.) And, if I’m permitted to editorialize, hats off to my old buddy Steve Scolari, whose family business Ray Heating – now RHP – has been on East Fourth for 70-plus years. Faced with the need to expand, he turned the main office building facing East Fourth Street into a great-looking little office, yet retained its post-war nuance, then upgraded a half-dozen industrial buildings on the street and railroad land to the south into very serviceable first-class modern shops, preserving the workforce and tax base in the East Fourth corridor. A gutty move, but a lead that more property owners in areas like East Fourth and South Wells Avenue should follow. And progressive city management, not hell-bent on plowing two or three hundred million dollars into a hole in the ground [the railroad trench!], should offer tax incentives for this “infill” redevelopment like other cities do. End of tirade.

Evidence of a bygone retail presence on East Fourth is Windy Moon Quilts on Morrill Avenue, the only quilt shop in town with a drive-up window. Why? ‘Cuz it once was a busy and highly profitable branch of First National Bank, that’s why. [In a later column I alluded to the Windy Moon moving to the former Mary Ann Nichols School on Pyramid Way in Sparks (pictured at the right), and some dude wrote the paper deriding my “poor research.” In reality, he was right; it’s still in the Morrill Avenue location as well as the former school. But to hell with thanking me for the plug…}

We couldn’t tour East Fourth without stopping at the architecturally resplendent Tap ‘n Tavern, where that’s not sawdust on the floor, but last night’s furniture, and then mosey on down Highway 40 to Casale’s Half-way Club for world-class pizza, and if Mama Stempeck ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. What a great lady… (pictured at left, photo courtesy Guy Clifton)

Many notes remain and readers will kick in a few more, so we’ll probably go back and finish this tour soon. I detected a slight deterrent to development on East Fourth while driving, starting, stopping, backing up, making notes and taking pictures, stopping again: on several occasions local ladies practicing the world’s oldest profession invited themselves into my pickup for a good time, some of whom were probably undercover police. “Honest, officer, I’m researching a column for the RGJ.” (Good story, buddy, tell it to Judge Salcedo.)